Concept Mapping

My concept map looks like something out of the Russell Crowe movie A Beautiful Mind or worse Charlie Day and his thoughts on who Pepe Silvia is. It's a mess of arrows and routes, and bubbles here and there. UGH! 

Well, I've decided to clean that sucker up a bit for the dissertation. This is the concept map I've been working on since last summer. It's supposed to show my thoughts in regards to my dissertation. Everything I bring up in my dissertation should be represented here with its relationship with other concepts. It's an illustration of my dissertation. 

Well, no more!

I've taken this living breathing hulking mass of nonsense and I've broken it down to just those things that will help develop memory retrieval cues for the learner. This is something I got from Learning that Sticks (my favorite non-fiction adult learning book). There should be cues that remind the learner about information they are trying to receive. These, in my new and improved concept map, are all the things that will help create those cues for the learner. 

I look at memory like a trail through the woods. My grandfather, when we went hunting, was always able to find the path to the hunting blind or the water tank where we hunted. To me it all looked the same, but somehow he always found it. Each year, boom, he'd lead us there. What I didn't know until later was that he was looking for tell tale markers he had placed to remind him when to turn. A tree here, a bit of fluorescent tape there, all of these things helped him remember. These are cue points. You add that with Hintzman and Blocks idea of repetition to reinforce memory, meaning the more you go over the path and trod down the grass, the easier it is to see the path, you have a pretty good system for finding your way back to where you want to go!

Am I done? 

Nope, this will still changes I'm sure, but I like it a bit more!